What should you expect when building a website?

Most businesses need a website to be successful. You may be able to create a website using a free website builder and existing templates, but it may be best to work with a web development agency. If you go the latter route, what can you expect from the development process of building a website?

Why Website Builders May Not Be Good Enough

Before we go any further, let's talk about why website builders might not be good enough for your website.

Free website builders are everywhere these days. Most of them follow the same formula, presenting you with a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor and hundreds of templates to choose from. In the span of an afternoon, even if you don't have much experience in website design or development, you can probably create a decent looking website.

But there are a few inherent problems with this approach, including:

Creative limits

You are going to suffer some serious creative limitations when building your website. Even if you're willing to pay for a template, you're still going to be working primarily with templates, which means there are inherent restrictions on what you can do with your website. In addition to this, there may be functional limitations for websites created with the free website builder of your choice.

Lack of expertise

Without the proper expertise and access to the right tools, developing your website can take a long time – and when you're done, you might not be happy with the end result. The truth is that even though free website builders can be used by almost anyone, they still require a bit of expertise if you want to get the most out of them. If you don't have this expertise, you'll be overlooking some of the platform's most important and valuable features.

The appearance of the model

It should also be noted that millions of websites are now created with free website builders, so they all look the same. Anyone experienced with these platforms can spot a website built with a template – and that's not a good look for your business. You know competitive differentiation is powerful, so it often pays to go beyond that when developing your website.

Scaling difficulty

Free website builders can also make it harder to scale your operations. If you decide to add a few new pages, that shouldn't be a problem. Nevertheless, suppose you want to expand the functionality of your website, dramatically increase its performance, or take the design in a fundamentally new direction. In this case, your free website builder may not be up to the task. Having your website designed and developed by professionals will give you much more flexibility in the future.

The Web Development Process: An Overview

The process of developing a website, when working with a professional web developer, usually happens in a series of phases. Each phase aims to achieve a set of objectives and builds on the last phase. Depending on the nature of your website and the ebb and flow of your working relationship, each phase can last a few days or a few weeks. Generally, if all goes well, you can expect this whole process to take between six and eight weeks.

Let's explore each phase.

Phase One: Discovery

The first phase is discovery. During discovery, your website developer will work with you to understand your brand and project as much as possible. Designers, developers, and project managers can be present at these meetings, taking notes, so they have the information they need to properly build your website.

During this time, you will likely review the following and more:

Your brand.

What are the key elements of your brand identity? What colors represent your brand? What is your brand personality? What should people think when they see your brand for the first time?

Your vision of the site.

What do you want your website to look like? How should it work? One of the best ways to explain this is to provide examples of existing websites that you already like.

Your existing site (if applicable).

Do you already have a website? If so, what don't you like? What are you trying to improve?

Your content and documents.

Do you have existing materials that you want to integrate into the website, such as existing content, photos, and design elements?

Phase 2: Site architecture/mapping

The second phase is the architecture and mapping of the site. This is a relatively simple phase where you and your web developer work together to create the overall architecture of your site. Why...